Read Online Bearing Witness by Michael A. Kahn - Free Book Online

won’t mind.” He turned to the others. “What do you say, gang? Let’s put on the old feed bag.”
    As the students moved toward the pizzas and beer, I grabbed Benny by the arm and pulled him back.
    â€œThanks,” I said, kissing him on the cheek, my eyes watering.
    â€œAw,” he said, shrugging it off, “no big deal.”

Chapter Five
    It was four o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Two hours ago we’d finished the last of the thirty-three boxes. In celebration and gratitude, I’d taken everyone to lunch at Balibans in the Central West End. After lunch, the students headed back to Wash U and Benny, Jacki, and I walked back to my office.
    It had been amazing—no, wonderful—to see how quickly those fresh, intelligent eyes could review and categorize seventy thousand documents. They’d ended last night’s session at eleven o’clock, started again this morning at eight-thirty, and finished by two. Even Benny—the man who had earned the nickname “Iron Butt” during our years together at Abbott & Windsor for his marathon document review sessions in In re Bottles & Cans —was impressed.
    As a result of their efforts, we’d at last defined the universe: one hundred forty-eight federal construction projects in the field of wastewater, groundwater, and other water control on which Beckman Engineering had submitted bids over the past ten years. It was a much larger universe than Ruth or I had imagined. Almost twice as large. Then again, until that snowy day last February, I’d no idea that any such universe existed, large or small.
    ***
    A girl hears things,” Ruth had told me that day.
    â€œThings?”
    â€œBad things.”
    Specifically, she’d heard over the years that something fishy was going on with the bids on certain federal government water-control projects in the Midwest.
    â€œIt was odd,” Ruth said with a puzzled look, her index finger pressed against her cheek. “It was as if we knew in advance which contracts we would win and which we would lose.” She raised her eyebrows knowingly. “You might want to keep that in mind, Rachel. It could embarrass them.”
    I can still remember that moment. I can remember turning toward the window to watch those big snowflakes waft down out of a pale sky. I can remember the bottom of the window scalloped with miniature snowdrifts like a Hallmark Cards Christmas scene. I can remember a vision of huge stacks of money, mountains of dollar bills thrusting upward into that pale sky. But most of all I can remember another vision, a far more troubling one—a vision of our tidy little lawsuit morphing into that rarest of litigation weapons, a lethal juggernaut known to few within the law and even fewer outside. Even its name is tinged with portent: qui tam .
    I had probed gingerly at first, asking in an almost offhand manner whether she had any specifics, any examples of what she had labeled the “inside track.” She’d overheard talk among her superiors about certain bids: “This one’s ours” and “We don’t get that one” and “We’re supposed to bid this one at nine point five mill.” She’d observed odd conduct surrounding certain bids. Some took weeks to prepare and included several site visits; others were literally slapped together overnight—an impossible time frame for a real bid. Even more unusual, she remembered a major project for the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant on an air force base in Oklahoma; the project team worked around the clock for two weeks to come up with a bid of $9,232,350, and then, unbeknownst to them, one of the higher-ups “rounded” the number up to $10.6 million—and Beckman Engineering was still low bidder.
    But most of all, I can remember Ruth’s complete obliviousness to the implications of what she had observed. She saw it as gossip that might